Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.
~ Abraham Lincoln, November 10, 1864

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

George Wallace's Stand in the Schoolhouse Door

June 11, 1963

Attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama, Democratic Governor George Wallace stands defiantly at the door of the Foster Auditorium while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenback.

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"Today I have stood where Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the Anglo-Saxon southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generation of forebears before us time and again down through history.

“Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”

George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, in a symbolic attempt to keep his inaugural promise of "Segregation now, Segregation tomorrow, Segregation forever" and stop the desegregation of schools, stood at the door of Foster Auditorium to try to block the entry of two black students, Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood.

The incident brought George Wallace into the national spotlight.

Today, 50 years removed from Wallace's protest, the University of Alabama's student body is 13 percent African American, which is only slightly lower than the national average of 14 percent of college students, but is equal to the overall percentage of black people in the United States.